Austria's Financial Market Authority has fined Bitpanda GmbH €70,000, marking the regulator's first published enforcement decision under the European Union's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation. The case sets an early public benchmark for how national regulators will police the bloc's year-old crypto framework.
The FMA found three separate compliance failures. Bitpanda did not submit a crypto-asset white paper at least 20 working days before publishing it, as MiCA requires. It circulated marketing communications before that white paper had actually been published. And those marketing materials omitted mandatory disclosures — a statement that the document had not yet been reviewed by regulators, along with required contact information.
The violations trace back to a white paper Bitpanda submitted in early 2025. Once the FMA flagged the issues, the exchange corrected them and pushed for what it called a swift, consensual resolution, using an expedited procedure under Austria's Financial Market Supervision Act that made the penalty final without a prolonged dispute.
Bitpanda's Response
Bitpanda said the violations concerned “timing and formal specifications surrounding the publication of the whitepaper and an accompanying information document,” adding that it had “prepared a comprehensive whitepaper in accordance with MiCAR requirements, submitted it to the FMA, and continuously coordinated the entire process.”
The company framed the episode as a procedural misstep rather than a substantive failure to meet MiCA's disclosure standards, and noted it worked with the regulator throughout rather than contesting the finding.
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Why This Case Matters Beyond Bitpanda
The FMA's official enforcement notice frames the decision as the start of a more visible oversight era for crypto-asset service providers, with the regulator explicitly publishing the case to signal how it will apply MiCA consistently across the market. Enforcement activity under the regime has picked up sharply since license deadlines passed earlier this year, with fines tied to MiCA violations already totaling in the hundreds of millions of euros across the bloc, and national authorities empowered to levy penalties as high as 12.5% of annual turnover for the most serious breaches.
A Well-Capitalized, Licensed Player
Bitpanda closed 2025 with 7.4 million registered users, up 25% year-over-year, and €371 million in adjusted revenue. It holds MiCA authorization from both Germany's BaFin, granted in January 2025, and Austria's FMA, granted in April 2025 — making it one of the more established, dual-licensed operators in the region. That the first published MiCA penalty landed on a well-resourced, already-licensed exchange over a paperwork timing issue, rather than a fly-by-night operator, underscores how procedurally strict the regulation's early enforcement is likely to be for everyone operating in the EU.
